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A couple of years ago, when my mother was ninety-six, I drove her to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to get a photo I.D. She no longer had a valid driver’s license or passport, and it seemed prudent for her to have some sort of visual documentation aside from her Costco card to verify that she was who she said she was. Though she had recently moved from Virginia to the bluest of blue—“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern”—states, I told her that it was possible that sometime in the near future she might need a photo I.D. to vote. That got her attention. If democracy were a religion, the polling place would be her church. Even the hint that she might not be allowed to vote motivated her to dig through her files until she found her birth certificate. It was the original, issued in 1928.

We navigated the department’s website to schedule an appointment, which turned out to be on an insanely hot day in September. When we arrived, we picked our way across the packed and potholed parking lot—my mother uses a walker—until we stood at the bottom of a ramp outside the building that was pitched at an ungodly steep angle. It took my mother pushing the walker and me pulling it to get her to the door. (I mention all this only to demonstrate that it can be a struggle for many people just to get to their D.M.V.)

Not surprisingly, the office was crowded with an assortment of hot and cranky people. (I would put us in this category.) But my mother had an appointment, so I assumed that she wouldn’t have to wait too long. This, as you already know, was a naïve assumption. We took a number and waited and then waited some more. Eventually, my mother wanted to leave. I believe the words she used were “this is stupid.” I reminded her why we were there, and she pointed out that she voted by mail, which didn’t require an I.D. It was in the middle of this argument when her number was called.

At the counter, my mother handed over her rent bill to prove that she was a Massachusetts resident and then carefully unfolded her birth certificate—the paper was yellowed and fragile—and slid it proudly across to the clerk. “It’s the original,” she said, and, when the clerk did not respond, she added, “from 1928.” The clerk said that she had to talk to a supervisor. When she came back, she told us that the document was unacceptable. “It’s missing a file number,” she said. “What’s a file number?” I asked. I was not trying to be smart. Not to worry—clearly the clerk thought I was a dimwit. “It’s a number on the birth certificate, for filing,” she said. “Maybe nearly a hundred years ago New York City hospitals didn’t have file numbers,” I said. The clerk shrugged. “You can come back when you have a file number,” she said, and that was that.

In the years since, I have thought about that day each time Republicans in Congress have pushed forward the deceptively named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. They did so in 2024, 2025, and most recently last month, when its newest iteration, the SAVE America Act, passed the House on nearly purely partisan lines, with only one Democrat—Henry Cuellar, of Texas—crossing the aisle. It now goes to the Senate, where Susan Collins, of Maine, has pledged to be the fiftieth Republican to support it. This means that if the Republicans can figure out a way to get around the sixty-vote threshold necessary to bring the bill to a vote—by, say, eliminating the filibuster—Vice-President J. D. Vance would vote to break the tie, President Donald Trump would sign it, and the SAVE America Act would become law. On Sunday, Trump threatened to veto all legislation coming across his desk until the SAVE America Act was passed, writing on Truth Social, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION—GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY—ILLNESS, DISABILITY.”

Threats aside, there may be other ways of pushing through the kinds of provisions in the SAVE America Act, such as bypassing Congress altogether. A year ago, President Trump issued an executive order, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which required proof of citizenship to register to vote and decimated voting by mail. That order was struck down in a summary judgment last October, but a draft for a new order goes even further. That draft has been disseminated by a group of Trump supporters who continue to claim interference in the 2020 election, including Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who has known Trump since high school. According to the Washington Post, they “expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.”

The draft calls for Trump to take control of elections from the states immediately, superseding their constitutionally derived authority, by declaring a national emergency based on a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. (The Post notes that an intelligence review found that China considered “efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.”) “Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that. But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin told the Post. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” The draft order would require all voters to re-register for the 2026 midterms, with proof of citizenship in hand.

On February 27th, Trump told a reporter for PBS that he had “never heard about” the draft. Yet, in a Truth Social post two weeks earlier, he wrote, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections whether approved by Congress or not!”

Disenfranchising voters who seem likely to vote for the other party has been a long-standing Republican project. Under Trump, that effort—including his call on Dan Bongino’s podcast for the Republicans to “nationalize the voting”—has focussed on another claim, that non-citizens are engaging in voter fraud. Susan Collins justified her support of the SAVE America Act by claiming that “there have been some incidents recently where people have called up town clerks and saying, ‘How do I get a friend of mine who’s from another country to vote here?’ And we’re not hearing a clear answer that only American citizens can vote in American elections.” But, as NPR recently reported, “Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.”

This reality has not dampened Republicans’ zeal for ginning up the spectre of “illegal aliens,” as the President calls them, infiltrating and corrupting the democratic process. An even more restrictive bill, introduced by the Republican representative Bryan Steil, of Wisconsin, which is currently pending in the House, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued I.D. to cast a ballot in person. Opponents of both bills say that requiring a government I.D. is burdensome on working people, people of color, students (because school I.D.s are not acceptable), and older Americans. If that claim seems overblown, consider the experience of my mother, a citizen who has voted in every election for the past seventy-five years. It’s hard to believe that her thwarted attempt was an anomaly. And what about someone who works a nine-to-five job and is unable to get to a D.M.V. or a county clerk’s office during working hours?

Then there’s the cost. Recently, my mother and I submitted a request to the New York City records department to get a copy of her birth certificate, hoping that it would come with a file number. It cost forty-five dollars. (The first link in my Google search was to a private company charging twice that.) In fact, even that document may not be sufficient. My mother is one of sixty-nine million American women who took their husband’s name when they got married. So, even if she returns to the Pittsfield Registry with an acceptable copy of her birth certificate and a rent bill, the names on them will not match. What then? The short answer is that she will be among the millions of Americans who will be summarily disenfranchised if a proof of citizenship is required to vote.

There are other provisions in both the SAVE and the MEGA acts that make it difficult for people to vote, or for their ballots to be counted, such as invalidating mailed ballots that arrive in the days after an election, even if they are postmarked on Election Day. And the MEGA bill puts an end to most voting by mail, something that Trump has been pursuing for years. Not surprisingly, states where everyone is allowed to vote by mail, such as Colorado and Washington, tend to have some of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. If the goal is to limit the franchise, that’s a good place to start.

President Trump, in his State of the Union address in February, urged the Republicans to figure out a way to pass the SAVE America Act as he railed against Democrats, saying, “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re gonna stop it.” As usual, he offered no evidence, but his claims nevertheless have consequences. Of the many ways to suppress the vote, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system may be the most insidious, because it undermines what should be our common faith in the integrity of democracy itself. ♦

The day Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times, in 2022, for more than a million dollars, should have been a moment of triumph. The game, which gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word, had unexpectedly become a global sensation, and Wardle had already begun to receive e-mails from puzzle designers seeking his input on their own ideas. “The underlying question was always, ‘How do I sell this to the New York Times?’ ” he told me. In their eyes, Wardle had achieved the ultimate success. Yet, as he fielded invitations from journalists, chat-show hosts, and podcast producers, Wardle felt only discombobulated, even borderline depressed.

The problem was not only the speed with which fame had upended his life but the fact that it had arrived uninvited. Wardle, who grew up on a farm in Wales, and who recently returned to the U.K. from Brooklyn, had built the game as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah: a bonding ritual they could share each evening. At the time, he didn’t consider himself a game designer, though play was deeply embedded in his professional life. While working as a product manager for Reddit, he had created a series of interactive projects for April Fools’ Day. One of them, from 2015, was the Button, a web page featuring a large button and a sixty-second countdown clock. Each time a visitor clicked the button, it reset the timer; if no one pressed it before the clock reached zero, the project would end. More than a million people participated before the countdown finally expired, three months later.

It was this sort of lightly mischievous design, combining play and social experiment, that led to Wordle. As the game slipped beyond Wardle’s living room, passing from friends to group chats to Twitter feeds around the world, many players started devotedly sharing their solve streaks—a dynamic not unlike the communal joy of the Button. For Wardle, though, the flood of attention felt overwhelming. “I’m not sure humans are built to handle going viral,” he said. He worried that others would copy and commercialize the game’s concept, whether he wanted them to or not; selling meant relinquishing control, along with responsibility for whatever followed. The day he sold the game was the last time he played it. He didn’t know what he would work on next, or how, exactly, he would pass his days.

Wardle found refuge in an unlikely place: the cryptic crossword, a kind of puzzle popular mostly in Britain, where it originated, in the nineteen-twenties. American, or “concise,” crosswords are typically exercises in trivia more so than wit. A conventional clue might read: “Got up.” If the solution line has four letters, two answers might fit—“rose” or “woke”—and only the crossing letters can settle the matter. The cryptic clue eliminates the ambiguity entirely. It might read: “Pairs of rowdy seagulls get up.” Here, “pairs of” is not a hint but an instruction: take pairs of letters from the following words—the “ro” of “rowdy,” the “se” of “seagulls”—and arrive at an answer, “rose,” that matches “get up.” The uncertainty collapses in a single, satisfying click. Chasing that click is the cryptic solver’s obsession.

Wardle had tried cryptic crosswords when he was younger, but found them to be impenetrable. “I didn’t know how to begin,” he told me. The rules could seem arcane, almost impossible to deduce. A clue containing the word “radio” could signal that “am” or “fm” belongs somewhere in the answer; “book” could imply “ot” or “nt” (Old and New Testament); “sailor” could require the letters “ab,” for “Able Bodied.” Anagrams were flagged by a bewildering range of indicators: “mixed,” “scrambled,” even “microwaved.” These codes often exhaust newcomers, who may feel as though they have arrived at the door of a private club, ignorant of its customs and wearing the wrong trousers. As P. G. Wodehouse wrote of the Times’s daily cryptic in 1945, “the humiliation of only being able to fill in about three words each day is too much for me.” Everyone needs a guide.

Wardle found his while listening to the podcast “Scriptnotes.” In one episode, the showrunner, Craig Mazin, of HBO’s “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” enthused that “everybody should do cryptic crosswords,” and explained some of the form’s underlying logic. “It really stayed with me,” Wardle said. Conversance led to discernment. He became a devotee of the Toronto-based mathematics teacher and puzzle constructor Fraser Simpson, whose clues struck Wardle as contemporary and enviably taut, without the usual “fodder” used to make a clue legible. “Every word in the clue is either definition or wordplay; there are no connector words,” he said. “I was stunned when I saw that.”

Wardle wanted to make a game that could teach the rules of cryptics, just as Mazin had taught him. The idea was vague, germinal; the prospect of actually releasing a follow-up to Wordle felt “paralyzing,” he said, and for a time he worked as a consultant, helping others on game prototypes, which freed him creatively. Then he began to sense an appetite. Cryptics seemed to be experiencing a modest revival; the Australian YouTube channel Minute Cryptic, for example, had drawn tens of thousands of viewers to short videos that unpacked a single clue at a time. Wardle enlisted the support of Chris Dary and Matt Lee, two longtime collaborators from Reddit, and their new game, Parseword, is now available, with a title that came from Wardle’s partner, Shah.

Neither Dary nor Lee had been familiar with cryptics before development began, and Wardle believes this strengthened the game. They felt comfortable questioning conventions, pressing him on assumptions a veteran solver might take for granted. The result, Wardle hopes, is a way to introduce newcomers to the joys and agonies of the cryptic, whose curious but finally comforting logic had been, for him, a salve.

Others have tried this before. In 1968, the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim published an essay in New York explaining the rewards of the cryptic crossword. In his view, the form was superior to the American crossword, full of “cleverness, humor, even a pseudo-aphoristic grace.” Sondheim began publishing his own cryptics in the magazine, complete with rules, examples, and prizes (copies of “Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary,” then priced at around five dollars). The experiment didn’t take. After forty-two puzzles, Sondheim retired the column, and cryptics remained—with occasional exceptions, including at this magazine—largely a British preoccupation.

The central premise of Parseword’s approach is to treat the cryptic not as a riddle to be intuited but as an equation to be solved. On “Scriptnotes,” Mazin had suggested that most cryptic clues contain a conceptual dividing line: on one side is the definition, on the other the wordplay. This led Wardle to consider how each clue might be broken into components; once one fragment was resolved, it might be substituted back into the whole, reducing the remaining complexity.

In Parseword, this process is pleasingly tactile. You can click on a word and see potential synonyms, as well as whether the word is a potential indicator. The game teaches you that in the clue “Taxi reduced fee,” for example, “reduced” is an indicator word, instructing you to shorten another word. Remove the “i” from “taxi” and you find the solution, which is confirmed by the definition: “fee.” Having learned the principle, a thoughtful player should be able to solve the next example: “Funk reduced joy.” Rather than asking newcomers to memorize a rulebook, Parseword makes the algebra visible, guiding players through a sequence of discrete steps. The mystery remains, but the path to clarity is no longer obscure.

Neither Wardle nor his collaborators started out as puzzle constructors, but they knew that cryptic creators are often as distinctive as prose writers. A friend introduced them to Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, revered constructors who, in the course of fifty years, produced cryptics for the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. “They were incredibly generous,” Wardle said. “They have this bank of clues, and they said we could use them.”

In recent years, crosswords have faced a gentle reckoning, as younger constructors push to update the form’s conventions, moving away from fusty references, obscure Latinisms, and other arcane rules by which, for example, the appearance of the word “school,” in a cryptic crossword, invariably signals that “Eton” lurks somewhere in the answer. Cox and Rathvon appear to avoid these habits, and Wardle and his collaborators have worked carefully to further soften the learning curve, beginning with an elegant tutorial designed to introduce essential techniques: deleting letters, joining them, spotting anagrams and homophones. Each daily clue is supported by a system of hints and prompts, which, in time, the player will learn to rely on less. The game still demands patience and study, however, almost guaranteeing that it will never approach the ubiquity of Wardle’s previous creation.

Indeed, the contrast between Wordle and Parseword is stark. Wordle’s power rests in its elegant restraint. “Even people for whom English is their second language are able to play,” Wardle said. Cryptics occupy the opposite end of the word-game spectrum, and Parseword admits to its difficulty in a blunt subtitle: “A tricky wordplay game.” For Wardle, too, this project feels vastly different. “Releasing Parseword is happening more on my own terms, instead of happening to me,” he said. His ambition is modest and, for now, apparently noncommercial. He hopes, simply, to “reduce the problem space for new solvers,” a phrase that sounds as though it could be parsed for indicator, connector, and definition. ♦

Birthday shopping can be stressful, but if you’re looking for the perfect gift for my niece Maya, here’s a selection of thoughtful, one-of-a-kind ideas that she’ll just love, as curated by me, her aunt who briefly interacted with her on our way out of a family thing when she was, like, fourteen.

Raisins
I saw Maya eating raisins once, years ago, after which she said, “Mmm, pass me a few more.” Obviously, she frickin’ adores raisins and wants no fewer than two five-kilogram boxes every month.

A (Some?) Labubu (Labubi?)
Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what these are. I say it’s a new kind of Tamagotchi, but my husband says it’s a type of jam. What I do know is that young people like them, and that Maya is twenty-one, unless she’s thirty-five now. Let me text her mom and get back to you.

Crate of Paco Rabanne Ultraviolet Eau de Parfum Samplers
By total coincidence, I just so happen to already own this from that time I went full-on nuts in the Orlando airport duty-free shop, in 2004, and now it’s taking up attic space that my husband needs for his protein powders. Anyway, it totally screams “Maya,” because she’s within driving distance, last I heard, so I probably won’t have to pay for shipping.

T-shirt That Says “I Love Elephants” for No Discernible Reason
I bought this for my daughter because it was seventy per cent off at Marshalls, even though she claimed that she didn’t want it because, and I quote, “Mom, I’ve literally never said a word about elephants in my life.” She and Maya are around the same age, I think, so, logically, it will fit Maya.

Annual Subscription to Nightingale Raisin Farm
Maya will for sure love this, because you get unlimited raisins every month until a lawyer sends them your notarized death certificate. Bonus: she’ll never have to worry about cancelling, because their customer-service number goes straight to a dim-sum kitchen in Guangdong.

“Fuck You, You Fuckin’ Fuck” T-shirt
A bit cheeky? Yes. But Maya lives in New York, and I have it on good authority that everyone down there absolutely cannot get enough of these.

Novelty Personalized License Plate That Says “Mary”
It’s the closest that I could find to “Maya” at the Orlando duty-free shop.

Notepad of Random Ideas I Had for Maya to Implement at Her Job (Which I Don’t Understand)
Maya works in H.R. at Verizon, and I have some pretty profitable ideas about how their phones should have a built-in spoon, in case you’re ever out and need a spoon.

An Air France Mug
They were giving them out at my husband’s job.

Etsy Floral Sham-and-Throw Set
Last time I saw Maya, I said, “Hey, how’s school?” And she said, “Good.” And I said, “Enjoying your classes?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Bio and algebra, right?” And she said, “Art and geography.” So, yeah, this feels right on the money.

“The Queer Eye Guide: How to Love Yourself the Fab Five Way”
My cousin’s neighbor’s sister-in-law’s hairdresser saw Maya at his CrossFit gym last year. The girls at my bridge club and I chatted about it, and we’re pretty sure we know where this leads.

TurboBlade Anti-Aging Mattifying Beard Oil
Crap, I accidentally copy-pasted from my open GQ “Gifts He’ll Love” tab.

Lifetime V.I.P. Pass to Raisin World Theme Park
Yes, at four hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, it’s pricey, but Readers Digest raves, “This park boasts the biggest slide made of raisins that you’re not allowed to get on for safety reasons in the Southwest.” ♦

The special election in Georgia’s Fourteenth District to replace Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is expected to go to a runoff on April 7th. There are no Party primaries for most special elections in the state, so both Democrats and Republicans will be on the same ballot—a so-called jungle primary—making it unlikely for a candidate to receive a majority of the votes. Greene, a Republican, resigned from her seat on January 5th, after President Donald Trump attacked her for supporting efforts to compel the Department of Justice to release its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein. She has declined to endorse a candidate in the race.

On the Republican side, Trump has endorsed Clay Fuller, the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit district attorney and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, dubbing him an “America First Patriot.” Fuller’s main Republican challenger is Colton Moore, a former member of the Georgia General Assembly who was banned from the state-Senate floor after calling the late speaker of the Georgia House David Ralston “one of the most corrupt Georgia leaders we’ll ever see in our lifetimes,” during a memorial for Ralston at the state House. Despite the ban, Moore later attempted to attend Governor Brian Kemp’s State of the State address and was subsequently arrested. He has been endorsed by the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz and Kyle Rittenhouse, the man who, as a seventeen year old, shot three people, killing two, at a racial-justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.

Shawn Harris, who previously ran for this seat in the 2024 election, is the most prominent Democrat on the ballot. Harris is a cattleman and a retired brigadier general who served in Afghanistan. He has been endorsed by the Floyd County Democratic Party, and by national figures such as Pete Buttigieg.